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Mars is ‘irrelevant to us’ if Earth is doomed, says Kim Stanley Robertson
- miika 4y agoYea, also, maybe we should try to make Sahara green before attempting to terraform Mars? :)
- CottonMcKnight 4y agoNeil DeGrasse Tyson made the point quite a while ago that if we had the ability to terraform another planet, we'd have the ability to fix our own.
- ceejayoz 4y agoThat's not necessarily true, though. There are things you can do with a fresh slate, empty planet that aren't feasible on Earth. It also misses the redundancy aspect of colonizing another planet. Short-term Mars plans aren't "terraform it so you can live outside"; it's stuff we can already likely accomplish in the Sahara or Antarctica if we really felt like it. Oases already exist in the Sahara; humans have permanent inhabitation in the Antarctic.
- undersuit 4y agoYeah, but slamming ice asteroids into Mars is also wholly impractical on current timescales.
- JumpCrisscross 4y agoAnother comment mentioned turning the Sahara green. This is] within our capacity. But the Sahara, as presently composited, is home to myriad life. It is a cultural edifice for bordering civilizations. And its modification would have repercussions for every other person on the planet. This baggage doesn't exist on Mars. (To the degree it does, it's de minimus compared with Earth's.) We can close off a canyon, pressurize it and call it a city. Try doing a tenth of that here without going bankrupt on the back of CEQUA challenges.
- btilly 4y agoAnd that is intellectually dishonest. If, as we are finding, it is easier to heat up a planet, then we can both terraform Mars and not fix Earth.
- nyokodo 4y ago> it is easier to heat up a planet, then we can both terraform Mars and not fix Earth That's not the only challenge with terraforming Mars, e.g. you also have to remove perchlorates and install a healthy soil microbiome etc. Those are fertile ground (pun not intended) for earthly applications.
- xupybd 4y agoPerhaps developing that technology on another planet is a good idea? I don't know about you but I hate developing on the production system. It's just too high stress.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- elevaet 4y agoOr master a self-sustaining community on Antarctica, which would be a lot less challenging than Mars.
- gerad 4y agoOr on, in or under the oceans.
- ceejayoz 4y agoWhy? "Don't do the hard thing, easier things exist" is always true. Why not do the harder thing? Marathon runners don't typically go "man, it'd be better if I just did a 5K", right?
- elevaet 4y agoThat's actually a great analogy because being able to run 5km is actually a prerequisite for being able to run 42km.
- ceejayoz 4y agoSure, but that doesn't mean you have to complete a 5K race before you're allowed to do a marathon. A marathon can be your first competitive race. We can similarly go to Mars before we grow crops in Antarctica, even if the resulting tech would also have the side benefit of being useful there. They needn't even be mutually exclusive; some prospective techs for a Mars or Moon base already get tested in places like Antarctica.
- Sevii 4y agoI'd expect to see people living in Antarctica before large numbers of people move to the Moon/Mars. Living conditions are a lot easier if you don't have to worry about pressure or oxygen.
- junofan 4y agoWhy? It’s much easier to leave Antarctica than it is to leave Mars.
- ceejayoz 4y agoWe're entirely capable of that already, and have done so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tafilalt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tafilalt
- antisthenes 4y agoWhat are we supposed to be seeing here? It's still a barren desert on Google Satellite imagery. And even if it wasn't, this town's area is minuscule compared to the area of the Sahara.
- ceejayoz 4y ago> What are we supposed to be seeing here? Life thriving in an inhospitable place. > And even if it wasn't, this town's area is minuscule compared to the area of the Sahara. As will the first couple hundred/thousand years worth of Mars bases. We'll be building oases first.
- antisthenes 4y ago> Life thriving in an inhospitable place. It's an oasis. Far from an inhospitable place. Certainly an order of magnitude more hospitable than Mars. > As will the first couple hundred/thousand years worth of Mars bases. Do you also intend to live forever to see the exponential leaps in technology required for this?
- ceejayoz 4y ago> It's an oasis. Far from an inhospitable place. The presence of water makes an otherwise inhospitable place attractive. The same is likely to be true on Mars - colonies will be sited near ice for the same reason. Do I intend to live forever? No. I think humans should make plans that benefit future generations, not just our own.
- onion2k 4y agoWe didn't make that hospitable though. We found a hospitable place in an otherwise barren landscape. That's very different to Mars. Mars is more like the rest of the desert, but with the addition of deadly levels of radiation and no breathable atmosphere.
- verdverm 4y agoNature does that every 5000 or 20000 years, iirc or maybe they haven't fully determined the cycle times yet. But there is evidence that it has been grassland and grazed upon
- newpavlov 4y agoOn Earth there are numerous second and third order effects to consider. For example, Sahara is considered a very important source of phosphorus for the Amazon rainforest [0] and making Sahara green could have a huge negative impact on it. Meanwhile on Mars impact of terraforming mistakes on population is much smaller because it would be already shielded heavily from external environment. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saharan_dust https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saharan_dust
- adrianN 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahara_Sea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sahara_Sea But as sibling comments said, this will likely have devastating effects on other ecosystems.
- karaterobot 4y ago> On its face, this might seem contradictory to say after writing a hopeful trilogy about the colonization of Mars, but it’s consistent if you look closer. Or if you realize that things authors write aren't necessarily what they think should happen in real life.
- rektide 4y agoKSR's books are such great tales of humanity. Again and again and again they resist great man theories of history & immerse us in such long views of how slow the tide of opinion is, how glacially humanity as a whole moves. The science fiction of KSR's books is more a backdrop, if often feels to me, to exploring social dynamics at varying scales. Rightly calling out non-terran colonization as futile without earth seems like a basic sensible lock I'd expect from this master of the genre, because while most of their books are going deep on intersocial dynamics, KSR hammers in a bunch of great sci-fi mini lessons, & this one seems fairly obvious.
- JumpCrisscross 4y agoWhich other series of his would you strongly recommend?
- Tossrock 4y agoTheyre not series, but Aurora and The Ministry for the Future both deal have those themes, and are quite good.
- MichaelCollins 4y agoMars colonization isn't happening. SpaceX's Starship might be flying within the next year, yet there has been no substantial development of Martian habitat technology. Are they building a bridge to nowhere? I think it's obvious that Starship was never about Mars; from the start it has been intended for launching extremely large satellite constellations (particularly for Starlink and DoD contracts.) SpaceX's talk of Mars is little more than a recruiting scheme. As far as I can tell the strongest evidence against my take is the $100M prize money Elon Musk has offered up for carbon capture that would supposedly be for making methane fuel on Mars. Making fuel that way would be pointless on Earth (except for greenwashing/PR.) But that's not even $100M spent, just $100M pledged.
- ceejayoz 4y ago> Mars colonization isn't happening. SpaceX's Starship might be flying within the next year, yet there has been no substantial development of Martian habitat technology. "Isn't happening" was similarly a slam against the Falcon 9's reusability prospects not long ago. It should hardly be shocking that no one's making Mars habitats until the details of getting them there are known; it's entirely possible Starship will receive significant redesigns during development, just as F9 did. > Are they building a bridge to nowhere? Yes, just as ship captains in the 1500s largely didn't build their own colonies in the Americas. The Mayflower made other trips back and forth, providing transport to settlers who were responsible for deciding what to bring and how to use it.
- deepdriver 4y agoIt's exciting to imagine various public and private ventures all booking rides on Starship to Mars, or more realistically in the short term, to the Moon.
- MichaelCollins 4y ago> "Isn't happening" was similarly a slam against the Falcon 9's reusability prospects not long ago. Not so. SpaceX was visibly investing in reusable boosters more than 10 years ago. Everything SpaceX has actually spent serious money on is something that has a mundane commercial application, reusable boosters particularly. There has been no comparable investment in Martian habitats. The "if you build it they will come" argument doesn't make sense. If serious Martian habitat development only starts after Starship is flying, it will take decades to be ready. The Europeans who sailed to America packed their ships with a bunch of commercially available supplies and hoped for the best. There is no commercially available Martian habitat, countless billions of dollars and many years of development will be necessary. That's presently not happening. Even if it starts tomorrow, that development would be laughably far behind Starship development. They're not building a rocket for customers they think maybe might exist in 20 or 30 years.
- nyokodo 4y ago> until we have solved our problems here, Mars is just a distraction for a few escapists, and so worse than useless. The problem with this attitude is that there is no evidence that we will ever completely solve our problems on earth. There is always going to be something threatening us even if it's mainly ourselves. Also, it's the same philosophy critics of the space race espoused yet many of the tools we use to identify and track our global problems are an unintended outgrowth of that great power contest, e.g. climate sensing satellites. It's a deeply inspiring effort to colonize another planet and far from an "escapist" activity it's something which gives many people hope for the future. It's much easier to be an "escapist" by dabbling in distractions on earth than it is by building rockets or working on the science to make life possible on Mars! Sure, the endeavor shouldn't be a major global economic line item in the meantime but I'm not aware of the necessity to go that far.
- sneak 4y agoNevermind that even if we turned Earth into a glorious green utopia, eventually a big enough rock is going to come along and boop us and kill everyone and everything. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunguska_event https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicxulub_crater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelyabinsk_meteor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yilan_crater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yilan_crater https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karakul_(Tajikistan) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karakul_(Tajikistan) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_impact_craters_on_Earth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_impact_craters_on_Eart... Maybe we can deflect it. Maybe we can’t. Right now we have no offsite backups. That should terrify everyone who cares in the slightest about human culture.
- shadowofneptune 4y agoIt is unlikely any of the planets in the solar system could sustain humanity or life if the Earth is lost in the next few centuries. Thousands, at most, would live on the planet. We've always had an ecosystem to rely on, and even a severely damaged one would be more survivable than the cold wastes of Mars.
- luxuryballs 4y agoWe should start by colonizing the bottom of the ocean before worrying about off planet.
- ceejayoz 4y agoWhy? What's the compelling benefit of the bottom of the ocean that Mars lacks? A crack in your Mars dome is fixable; a crack at the bottom of the ocean means instant death beyond a couple hundred feet down.
- ncmncm 4y agoColonizing the sea floor (continental shelf, really) has the overwhelming advantage over Mars that it should be possible, in principle.
- ceejayoz 4y agoWe have an easier time keeping folks alive on the ISS than on the ocean floor. The pressure differential between vacuum and human-friendly conditions is one atmosphere. In the water, every ten meters down is another atmosphere of pressure. Leaks on a submarine become quickly catastrophic; small leaks in space can be fixed over months. (https://www.space.com/cosmonauts-seal-space-station-air-leak-cracks https://www.space.com/cosmonauts-seal-space-station-air-leak...)
- ncmncm 4y agoYet, anything in the water is no more than a few hours away, and any mass of equipment or supplies can be moved there in that time, anytime you like. Mars is always at best 9 months away. (Not 6 as Elon likes to lie.) Usually it would take much longer. And, how much stuff you can move at once is drastically limited. There is no need to go below just a few atmospheres worth of pressure, in any case. Little that happens at the surface penetrates very deep.
- dwaltrip 4y agoIt has the overwhelming disadvantage that no one wants to do it. It’s not that interesting or exciting.
- washbrain 4y agoRed Mars is an all time great. Absolutely worth a read. You'll fail out the first attempt, but come back and try it a second time. The next two sequels have some of the best socialist-without-calling-it-socialist storytelling of the modern era.
- Flankk 4y agoI've heard of massive dust storms on Mars. This is the first I've heard of deadly dust. It's also bombarded by X-rays and gamma rays. So Mars is completely uninhabitable. Astronauts would need an airlock with chemical shower and secondary breathing apparatus to be able to even consider taking off their space suit. The base would have to be underground. To be clear the plan is to fly past the moon and through space for nine months for that? Sounds half baked.
- elihu 4y agoI don't understand why "the base would have to be underground" is such a deal-breaker for so many people. I mean it would suck if your whole environment is like a typical basement, but these could be quite large living spaces, well lit with plants and trees and big empty spaces. Lava tubes on Earth that are spacious and miles long aren't all that rare, and on Mars I think the expectation is that lower gravity should tend to result in larger lava tubes. The perchlorates are a problem, but not one that's impossible to deal with. One possible workaround is to have space suits that you never actually bring inside, you just sort of climb in and out through a hatch in the back that docks with the habitat. Similarly with vehicles, they could dock with the habitat so you can get in and out without going outside.
- Flankk 4y agoMars is made of solid volcanic rock covered in dust. If the hypothetical lava tube idea doesn't work, not much else will. My skepticism begins with SpaceX releasing illustrations of a planned above-ground base.[1] Elon has said for the base to become self sustainable they will need around a million people. There is a fine line between genius and insanity. [1] https://images.adsttc.com/media/images/59ce/60f5/b22e/384e/1000/00bf/slideshow/Screen_Shot_2017-09-29_at_10.43.48_AM.jpg https://images.adsttc.com/media/images/59ce/60f5/b22e/384e/1...
- elihu 4y agoI agree that an above-ground base is probably not realistic without substantial shielding. The illustration I'm inclined to interpret as marketing fluff. I don't think lava tubes are the only option, though -- they're just probably the best option in terms of most space for the least effort. Mars has a lot of sulfur which can be used to make a kind of sulfur-based concrete that isn't used much on Earth because Portland cement is much more useful and convenient. But let's say you can make building blocks out of sulfur-based concrete or some other native material. (Worst case you make them out of something light and bring them with you from Earth.) You dig a big hole in the dusty soil, then stack blocks igloo-fashion to make a dome in the bottom of the hole. Then you stack some more blocks to make a (relatively) dust-free stairwell, then pile the Martian soid set aside from digging the hole back over the top of everything else. So now you have a strong below-ground compressive structure that you can line with plastic or something and put in an airlock. The weight of the soil above counteracts the air pressure inside. Ideally most of the habitat-construction work would be done by robots before people get there; that would be some tricky engineering though.
- philip142au 4y agoThis is silly, by that logic everything is doomed and it doesn’t take into account the backup nature of Mars and living in space
- UberFly 4y agoEarth isn't doomed, just the current lifeforms on it: Humans and the unfortunate rest that are along for the ride.
- onion2k 4y agoThe aim of humanity is to continue as a species. Whether the Earth as a chunk of rock orbiting the sun will carry without us doesn't matter; when we talk about "life" we mean humans.
- ncmncm 4y agoI have high hopes that the raccoons could do better. We would have to get out of their way to give them the opportunity.
- hammyhavoc 4y agoHumanity has "aims"? Seems like a significant amount of folks have galloping apathy.
- onion2k 4y agoA small number of people realised that they can get vastly rich individually by telling large numbers of people they should passively consume media instead of actually living...
- birksherty 4y agoThis argument is tiresome. Earth is not just a rock, it includes all the species and environment, which is doomed. If it's only just a rock, there are billions such, name any of those earth and problem solved. Whatever happens after that, when or if things will be like now flourishing, nobody surely knows. So lets stop guessing that part. Everything that is here right now except the rock is dying. On the contrary humans will survive even if there are full blown nuclear attacks, we will go underground. So except humans everything else is doomed.
- quickthrower2 4y agoIf we can't live on Earth, we can always terraform Earth.
- ctoth 4y agoHopefully not by crashing an asteroid into it.
- willi59549879 4y agoThe idea is nice to 'safe' humanity by creating a colony on mars. But the problem I see in that is we would be creating fractions of marsians and earthlings. That I only see in ending up in more conflict between the two. If we can't live in harmony on earth how can a colony on mars be even possible? United earth has a better chance than colonies elsewhere.
- molticrystal 4y agoIt is the journey that engineering and our psychology as a species goes through in order to take us to Mars that is the important part, just like how it was for the Moon. We advance in our ability to understand and control materials and learn what is truly necessary to sustain life, while our astronauts experience a world without borders and return with their tales. It is very short sighted to believe that we have to frame every problem as a terrestrial problem with limited scope we have to solve, and that narrow-mindedness is something that will make it more difficult to find general solutions that are applicable beyond the bounds of earth or may even involve utilization of beyond earth resources such as space, asteroids, low gravity, satellites, or something novel.
- davidivadavid 4y agoKim Stanley Robertson? Get some editors, Vice.
- dorkwood 4y agoIf we can't terraform Earth, how are we supposed to terraform Mars?
- ceejayoz 4y agoWe have terraformed the shit out of Earth.
- bvoq 4y agoop means terraform in a sustainable way. i argue that we are good at making things liveable but not sustainable. i would not be surprised if the exploitation of resources will continue galactically and we should do so to carry the light of consciousness :-)
- mariusor 4y agoKim Stanley Who? Could a mod edit the title with the proper name please?
- mgdlbp 4y agoHave you never heard of Corey Doctorow? Neil Gayman? Arthur C Clark? You can find plenty of info about each of them online.
- bvoq 4y agoa mars city is still worth the investment. it is easier to build a city on mars than to solve all the problems on earth.
- dundarious 4y agoDebatable. And the point is that the benefit of solving/ameliorating the climate problem on Earth is far far far greater than the benefit of a Mars colony. We just have to put ourselves on some sustainable footing and survive until the 22nd century, before we start trying to solve problems like “ensuring humanity’s survival post Earth-shattering asteroid strike”, which is all that a serious Mars colony would solve.
- bvoq 4y agoWe are good at making things liveable. We are not good at making things sustainable. It makes no sense to only invest in one of these ventures.
- hnplj 4y ago
- snapplebobapple 4y agoI didnt realize this place was so infested with people that have swallowed the environmental catastrophe koolaid. Even if we accept the models as correct (they likely are not, but lets ignore that) the timelines to destruction are measured in centuries in all but the most insane models and pretty much all the models fail to take into account the likely topping out of population growth and beginning of.population shrinking that will almost certainly happen later this century. The faster we get to Mars (or oneill cylinders or some other viable off planet backup) the faster we can get them to self sustaining. So in the face of uncertainty it is insane to have the opinion that we shouldn't be working on offside backup because we very well could have it self sustaining before a catastrophe actually happens because we don't really know when the catastrophe will occur and our predictions are likely dramatically incorrectly biased to pessimism
- mafuy 4y ago> Even if we accept the models as correct They were not correct. They were overly optimistic.
- origin_path 4y agoModels vs observed temperatures from satellites: http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/CMIP5-90-models-global-Tsfc-vs-obs-thru-2013.png http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/CMIP5-90-mode... It says the opposite. How do you explain that?
- snapplebobapple 4y agoor everything in steve Koonin's book unsettled. There are real problems at the basic science level with the models and to say they are overly optimistic is just another sign of excessive koolaid consumption.
- birksherty 4y agoOpposite, most people in world are still drinking the overpopulation koolaid given by the privileged and corporations. Who wants more people only to buy their products and keep the quarterly growth moving up and for cheap labour exploit.
- aniken 4y agoKind of a tangent, but for any German speakers (or someone learning German), there is a fun series about kids on a Mars Colony from Andreas Eschbach called Das Marsprojekt, it has 6 books in the series. It was really fun to read, and if you’re intermediate a good way to learn.
- amai 4y agoAmerica is „irrelevant to us“ if Europe is doomed, said someone in the 16th century.
- chemmail 4y agoI was thinking about this when they feel fusion is getting close. We might solve the worlds energy problems. But it doesn't solve the 1000s of others.